Monday, July 13, 2009

The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of a warmer world, according to research published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience.

If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it has been moving north, then some Pacific islands near the equator -- even those that currently enjoy abundant rainfall -- may be drier within decades and starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner. The prospect of additional warming because of greenhouse gases means that situation could happen even sooner.

The findings suggest "that increasing greenhouse gases could potentially shift the primary band of precipitation in the tropics with profound implications for the societies and economies that depend on it," the article says.

"We're talking about the most prominent rainfall feature on the planet, one that many people depend on as the source of their freshwater because there is no groundwater to speak of where they live," says Julian Sachs, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Washington and lead author of the paper. "In addition many other people who live in the tropics but farther afield from the Pacific could be affected because this band of rain shapes atmospheric circulation patterns throughout the world."

The band of rainfall happens at what is called the intertropical convergence zone. There, just north of the equator, trade winds from the northern and southern hemispheres collide at the same time heat pours into the atmosphere from the tropical sun. Rain clouds 30,000 feet thick in places proceed to dump as much as 13 feet (4 meters) of rain a year in some places. The band stretching across the Pacific is generally between 3 degrees and 10 degrees north of the equator depending on the time of year. It has recently been hypothesized that the intertropical convergence zone does not reside in the southern hemisphere for reasons having to do with the distribution of land masses and locations of major mountain ranges in the world, particularly the Andes mountains, that have not changed for millions of years.

The new article presents surprising evidence that the intertropical convergence zone hugged the equator some 3 ½ centuries ago during Earth's little ice age, which lasted from 1400 to 1850.

The authors analyzed the record of rainfall in lake and lagoon sediments from four Pacific islands at or near the equator.

One of the islands they studied, Washington Island, is about 5 degrees north of the equator. Today it is at the southern edge of the intertropical convergence zone and receives nearly 10 feet (2.9 meters) of rain a year. But cores reveal a very different Washington Island in the past: It was arid, especially during the little ice age.

Among other things, the scientists looked for evidence in sediment cores of salt-tolerant microbes. On Washington Island they found that evidence in 400- to 1,000-year-old sediment underlying what is now a freshwater lake. Such organisms could only have thrived if rainfall was much reduced from today's high levels on the island. Additional evidence for changes in rainfall were provided by ratios of hydrogen isotopes of material in the sediments that can only be explained by large changes in precipitation.

Sediment cores from Palau, which lies about 7 degrees north of the equator and in the heart of the modern convergence zone, also revealed arid conditions during the little ice age.

In contrast, the researchers present evidence that the Galapagos Islands, today an arid place on the equator in the Eastern Pacific, had a wet climate during the little ice age.

They write, "The observations of dry climates on Washington Island and Palau and a wet climate in the Galapagos between about 1420-1560/1640 provide strong evidence for an intertropical convergence zone located perennially south of Washington Island (5 degrees north) during that time and perhaps until the end of the eighteenth century."

If the zone at that time experienced seasonal variations of 7 degrees latitude, as it does today, then during some seasons it would have extended southward to at least the equator, Sachs says. This has been inferred previously from studies of the intertropical convergence zone on or near the continents, but the new data from the Pacific Ocean region is clearer because the feature is so easy to identify there.

The remarkable southward shift in the location of the intertropical convergence zone during the little ice age cannot be explained by changes in the distribution of continents and mountain ranges because they were in the same places in the little ice age as they are now. Instead, the co-authors point out that the Earth received less solar radiation during the little ice age, about 0.1 percent less than today, and speculate that may have caused the zone to hover closer to the equator until solar radiation picked back up.

"If the intertropical convergence zone was 550 kilometers, or 5 degrees, south of its present position as recently as 1630, it must have migrated north at an average rate of 1.4 kilometers -- just less than a mile -- a year," Sachs says. "Were that rate to continue, the intertropical convergence zone will be 126 kilometers -- or more than 75 miles -- north of its current position by the latter part of this century."

Most scientists who create models trying to understand the mechanics and aerodynamics of insect flight have assumed that insect wings are relatively rigid as they flap.

New University of Washington research using high-speed digital imaging shows that, at least for some insects, wings that flex and deform, something like what happens to a heavy beach towel when you snap it to get rid of the sand, are the best for staying aloft.

"The evidence indicates that flexible wings are producing profoundly different air flows than stiff wings, and those flows appear to be more beneficial for generating lift," said Andrew Mountcastle, a UW doctoral student in biology.

He used particle image velocimetry, a technique commonly used to determine flow velocities in fluids, to study how air flows over the wings of Manduca sexta, or tobacco hawkmoths. The method combined laser light and high-speed digital video to model air flow.

A hawkmoth's wings are controlled by muscles on the insect's body and have no internal muscles of their own. The bulk of the wing is something like fabric stretched back from a stiff leading edge, fabric that is elastic and bends from inertia as the wing accelerates or decelerates through each stroke.

To test the wings' function, they were attached to mechanical "flappers" that moved back and forth 25 times a second, the same frequency at which the moths flap their wings, with the focus on how the wings deformed with each motion reversal. While the machine placed the wings at the same dominant angle as in normal moth flight, it could only approximate natural motion in one axis of rotation, compared with the three axes controlled in actual moth flight.

For the research, wings were removed from moths and tested in the mechanical "flapper" immediately, while they maintained most of their natural elasticity. After that the wings were allowed to dry for 12 to 24 hours and covered with enough spray paint to restore their original mass, then the wings were tested again in their more rigid state. The high-speed video, when viewed in slow motion, provided graphic detail of how the wings deformed as they flapped.

"That gave us two profoundly different deformations when we flapped the wings at natural wing-beat frequencies," Mountcastle said.

The "fresh," or flexible, wings had a mean deformation of 1.6 millimeters (about 64-thousandths of an inch) for each of five motion reversals, while the dry, stiff wings had a mean deformation of 1.15 millimeters (about 46-thousandths of an inch). By comparison, a freely hovering moth had a mean deformation of 1.52 millimeters (about 61-thousandths of an inch).

"Our results show that the flexible wings are doing a better job of generating lift-favorable momentum than are the stiff wings. They also are inducing airflow with greater overall velocity, which suggests the production of greater force for flight," Mountcastle said.

He is the lead author of a paper on the work, published in May in the journal Experiments in Fluids. Co-author is Thomas Daniel, a UW biology professor. The work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair.

"As a biologist, I am interested in the evolutionary implications of what we see here. To understand the selective pressures that have acted on wings through their evolution, we have to understand the functional implication of wing forms and their material properties," Mountcastle said.

He noted that insect wings have a wide variety of shapes and functions, and trying to understand how such diversity came about "is a really interesting biological question."

"There also is interest in developing tiny insect-like flapping robots, and certainly these results are relevant to that field," he said.

In the past, it was necessary to race to the bank for every money transfer and every bank statement. Today, bank transactions can be easily carried out at home. Now where is that piece of paper again with the TAN numbers? In the future you can spare yourself the search for the number. Simply touch your EC card and a small integrated display shows the TAN number to be used. Just type in the number and off you go. This is made possible by a printable battery that can be produced cost-effectively on a large scale.

It was developed by a research team led by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Baumann of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS in Chemnitz together with colleagues from TU Chemnitz and Menippos GmbH. "Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each," states Dr. Andreas Willert, group manager at ENAS.

The characteristics of the battery differ significantly from those of conventional batteries. The printable version weighs less than one gram on the scales, is not even one millimeter thick and can therefore be integrated into bank cards, for example. The battery contains no mercury and is in this respect environmentally friendly. Its voltage is 1.5 V, which lies within the normal range. By placing several batteries in a row, voltages of 3 V, 4.5 V and 6 V can also be achieved. The new type of battery is composed of different layers: a zinc anode and a manganese cathode, among others. Zinc and manganese react with one another and produce electricity. However, the anode and the cathode layer dissipate gradually during this chemical process. Therefore, the battery is suitable for applications which have a limited life span or a limited power requirement, for instance greeting cards.

The batteries are printed using a silk-screen printing method similar to that used for t-shirts and signs. A kind of rubber lip presses the printing paste through a screen onto the substrate. A template covers the areas that are not to be printed on. Through this process it is possible to apply comparatively large quantities of printing paste, and the individual layers are slightly thicker than a hair. The researchers have already produced the batteries on a laboratory scale. At the end of this year, the first products could possibly be finished.